Whether you put the emphasis on the first or second word of that term depends on what you think about Hitchens. Was he a serious thinker who elevated our shared discourse, or a publicity monger, who not only chose to live but to die in the spotlight?

Socialist? Left-winger? Soixante-Huitard? Hitchens had all but repudiated those labels himself by the end of his life.

Prodigy? Hitchens, who was legendary for his broad knowledge, his sharp tongue, his fluency (he could dash off a 5,000-word article at a single sitting) made a big splash early and conducted himself like an enfant terrible until the end of his life.

Provocateur? Polemicist? Hitchens liked nothing so much as an intellectual street fight: His broadsides against Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton are not balanced considerations but attempts to bash their subjects’ heads into the dirt. Although he rejected the ’60s slogan “The Personal is Political,” Hitchens was a peerless practitioner of the ad hominem attack: his book on Kissinger even features a few photos of the former secretary of state picking his nose.

Iconoclast? Hitchens rejected this label as “affectionate and a little condescending,” yet the literal definition of an iconoclast is one who destroys religious symbols, something Hitchens did with Voltairian brio and acidity in his attacks on organized religion.

Contrarian? This was the Hitch’s preferred self-description. Yet the contrarian, by definition, has no fixed principles and defines himself by continuous opposition.

To these Richard Seymour, the author of ” Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens” would add apostate and perhaps traitor. Echoing of the title and manner of Hitchens’ own “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Seymour’s book is a long bill of indictment. “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” was published by the left-wing Verso Books, which not-so-coincidentally has published “Unhitched.”

By apostate, Seymour means one who deserts his own ideology for another, usually at the opposite extreme. Seymour makes a convincing case that Hitchens’ sharp turn to the right after 9/11 reflected tendencies that were there all along: Hitchens, the son of a naval officer, always had a soft spot for empire and never cared for many of the features of left-wing politics: anti-Americanism, identity politics, doctrinal disputes. He was also a cultural conservative from the very beginning.

Seymour is withering, in the best Hitchens-like way, about the writer’s “fetishizing of the military”:

In a piece of rhetorical bravado — or a lie, as it might less politely be called — Hitchens went on to claim that the troops [in post-Katrina New Orleans] “had learned in Iraq matters of civil reconstruction, water distribution, purification that have been extremely useful in New Orleans.” Naturally, every word of this was nonsense: the Army Corps of Engineers needed no tour of Iraq, its infrastructure devastated many times over by the occupation, to learn its trade. But the miracles of empire were endless.

Seymour accuses Hitchens of embracing the orthodoxy of the Neoconservatives; but Seymour himself would substitute one orthodoxy for another, that of the English academic left, in which all civilization is worthy of respect except Western civilization, American history is nothing but a narrative of rape and exploitation, and, compared to a rigorous thinker like professor Terry Eagleton, George Orwell is nothing but a dilettante.

In trying to find motivation for Hitchens’ turn to the right, Seymour emphasizes the writer’s careerism, but he would do better to examine his self-destructiveness. Much of Hitchens’ post-9/11 commentary is so crude, so truculent, so bloodthirsty, that it’s hard to read it as anything other than a writer trying to destroy his own reputation out of sheer perversity.

Hitchens’ legacy might lie not in his politics but in his prose. He was one of the last writers to effortlessly channel the great tradition of the English essay: He appropriated Dr. Johnson’s authority, Gibbon’s elaborately balanced Latinate constructions, Carlyle’s patrician snarl, Arnold’s damp irony, Wilde and Chesterton’s love of paradox, Orwell’s bracing commonsense, all chased down with dash of Menckenian bitters.